The Cobweb

by Neal Stephenson; J. Frederick George

“You are an amazing creature,” he said, turning to look at her, continuing to stir the meat with his other hand. The Big Boss just crossed her arms over her breasts, on top of her belly, and smiled at him.

  “Remember we have class tonight,” she said.

  Clyde wanted to make a disparaging comment about the class, in which a nurse from Methodist Hospital, a woman with long gray hair parted in the middle, who lived with another woman and a lot of cats on a farm near Wapsipinicon, told Clyde and Desiree and a bunch of other couples how to breathe. Clyde had had a lot of confidence in Desiree’s breathing skills to begin with, as she had been doing it for more than thirty years now without any significant interruption. But even his first gently snide comment on the breathing class, a couple of months ago, had led pretty quickly to tears on her part, reminding him the hard way that as soon as he and Desiree had decided to get pregnant, they had entered into an area of incredible tenderness where he was poorly equipped to do or say anything without causing lots of emotional damage. So now he just followed the Big Boss around with his hands down at his sides, taking small steps, not saying much, and it seemed to work pretty well.

  “I’ll be back for it,” he said.

  “You gonna start today?” Desiree said.

  He hesitated for a second and then said, “Yup,” which, now that he had said the word to his wife, meant that he was committed for good. Clyde Banks was running for sheriff.

  two

  JAMES GABOR Millikan woke up every morning at six and did not move a muscle of his body thereafter for fifteen minutes. He always found the transition from the unconsciousness of sleep to the exquisitely controlled existence of his waking life to be frightening. He lay rigid, eyes open, as he ran through the checklists of his life with the same thoroughness as a pilot preparing a 747 for a transpacific flight.

  And he would not think the comparison inapt. As the pilot did not want to crash and burn in midocean for lack of preparation, so too did Millikan not want to make the slightest misstatement or give the world any chance to make a misreading of him, and thereby of the United States of America. Only when he had assured himself of the status of the multiple compartments of his life did he begin to emerge from the protective cocoon of his eiderdown.

  He stepped into his English slippers, which he had carefully arranged by the side of his bed the previous evening, and put on his robe over his striped pajamas. His home was on Wisconsin Avenue in Washington, D.C., right across from the National Cathedral, but this morning he happened to be in Paris, in the Hotel Inter-Continental. Nevertheless, his slippers and robe were exactly where they would have been at home. He had bathed and shaved the previous evening. He applied some Brylcreem to his thinning hair and took a swipe with his electric razor at the glittery silver stubble that had dared to emerge since midnight.

  He devoted three quarters of an hour to reading several documents from his briefcase, most of them terse cables originating from major cities in the Middle East.

  He went back to the suite’s bedchamber and applied his cologne and deodorant, specially mixed at Whitsons on the High in Oxford. He opened the armoire. On the top shelf there were the ten folded and starched French-cuffed white shirts that were always at the ready. On the next shelf were the ten pairs of black silk stockings, the ten pairs of pressed and starched boxer shorts, the ten undershirts, and the ten starched linen handkerchiefs. On the next shelf were the three pairs of matching black wing tips that he alternated from day to day. He had five dark-charcoal pinstripe suits from Mallory’s on Savile Row hanging up, which he wore in sequence, one of them always out at the dry cleaner’s. He had five silk Hermès ties comfortably nesting in their rack.

  He dressed in a determined and efficient manner, put on his tie, his fleur-de-lis cuff links (he was, after all, in France), his Duckers Wing tips, handmade at the shop on the Turl in Oxford, looked at himself in the full-length mirror on the inside of the door of the armoire, pulled his cashmere coat from its hanger.

  Then he went down to the front desk, nodded to the doorman, and stepped out into the streets of his favorite city. He stopped on the sidewalk and breathed the cool, fragrant air of early spring—the cherry trees and early rhododendrons were peaking. He looked down the Rue Castiglione at the pink-tinted clouds over the Tuileries. He turned left and strolled to the Rue St. Honoré; the breeze shifted as he came to the corner, and he smelled roasting coffee and baking bread. He stopped at his favorite corner café, stood next to a blue-uniformed sanitation man, drank a café noir, and ate a croissant.

  He walked onward, stepping carefully through the random pattern of dog shit, noting that thanks to Georges Haussmann, the gutters of Paris were always cleaner than the sidewalks. He walked with some care and looked at the windows of the boutiques that catered to capitalism’s winners and their significant others: Gucci, Salavin Chocolatier, Guerlain, Bulgari, and Fayer.

  He especially loved Paris early in the day, when it was still quiet, and while the city of Washington was still asleep, and (except for the nocturnal gnomes at the Agency) incapable of pestering him. That would begin around midafternoon, too late to spoil his luncheon meeting. For the next few hours Millikan was more or less a free agent, and he was at the peak of his game: articulating the gross and crude impulses of the United States of America into a foreign policy toward the rest of the world. He, not Baker over at State, understood the United States of America and the world. He, James Gabor Millikan, was the one who was here, out in the field, preparing for a luncheon meeting with his old friend, Tariq Aziz, the foreign minister of Iraq. It had been scheduled as a dinner meeting, but Aziz had been mysteriously summoned back to Baghdad and had requested a lunch instead.

  He looked in briefly at the Eglise Polonaise, crossing himself as he stepped inside, admiring the ecstatic baroque saints and wannabe saints on the walls. He moved on to the Rue Royale, paused for a moment to admire the neoclassical elegance of the Madeleine on the right, then took a left toward the Place de la Concorde. The hieroglyphs on the obelisk were uncommonly clear and crisp in the light of the rising sun, as if they had just been carved last night.

  To the right was the American Embassy, housed in an eighteenth-century prerevolutionary building of magnificently useless elegance. He ignored the main entrance and proceeded to the back, where the Marine guards waved him through, past parked cars to an unmarked but well-guarded entrance that led to a small elevator. He rode it up to the fourth of five floors, where he was greeted by another Marine guard and the CIA duty officer, who were expecting him.

  He was where the action was: the secure rooms. Nothing important happened elsewhere. All of the other folderol in the embassy was useless pretension. The duty officer punched him through a vault entrance set incongruously in an elaborate door frame. Through the heavy door he could hear a loud whooshing noise. When the duty officer opened it, the noise drowned out all other sound, like giant garage fans: not so much loud as it was full and all-encompassing.

  They were looking at a room within a room: a glass box built on four bimetallic springs that isolated it from the rest of the building.

  Millikan walked quickly across the few feet of empty space surrounding the glass room; supposedly it was jammed with electromagnetic radiation that would fry your kidneys, or something, if you lingered there. Then he was inside the glass box. His assistant, Richard Dellinger, was waiting for him as well as a file marked “Eyes Only.” It contained the latest reports from Langley to prepare him for whatever Aziz might be up to. As usual there was nothing there that he didn’t know. They weren’t exactly sure why Aziz had been called back on such short notice, but it could very well be some internal nonsense that had nothing to do with the substance of the actual meeting, and so Millikan decided not to waste effort speculating.

  At half-past noon he and Dellinger went downstairs and proceeded to the Hotel Crillon, next door to the embassy. Huge flowing taffeta curtains complemented the dark-red carpets and framed the high windows that afforded a vie
w over the Place de la Concorde and across the Seine to the Assemblée Nationale. The dining room was full of rich Japanese tourists and Arabs. The maître d’ rushed up, in a dignified way, to inform Millikan that Aziz had preceded him.

  Millikan made a bemused face at Dellinger. “He must be in a hurry.”

  They followed the maître d’ to a small private dining room off the corner of the restaurant, containing a single table set with crisp white linen tablecloths, silver settings, and a charming little bouquet of spring flowers in the center. An Arab man with a shock of graying hair, a little mustache, and heavy eyeglasses was rising to his feet to greet them.

  Millikan had known Aziz since they had both been students in England, and he counted the man to be his intellectual and diplomatic equal. Even though he represented a single-resource, underdeveloped country led by a madman, Aziz matched Millikan in his ability to articulate the gross and crude impulses of Iraq into a foreign policy toward the rest of the world.

  Millikan and Aziz belonged to that most elite club in the world, even more elite than the great intelligence establishments, the financial operations, and the political systems. There were a few, an extremely few, people in the world who by sheer dint of their intelligence and their sensitivities could overcome the limitations of national identity, the normal rewards system of politics, and, most of all, the stupidities of their own bureaucracies to navigate the path to world survival. Politicians, of necessity, were the great captains of the national vessels plying the difficult and anarchic seas of international relations. But they were blind without pilots like Millikan and Aziz, men who could see both the obvious reefs and rocks of disaster and who knew the treacherous sandbars and hidden structures of icebergs. They served their states, because only states had the resources to make use of their intelligence. But for these people of all-penetrating insight, there were no masters. They were a self-proclaimed, self-regulating corps of professionals, the last of the true diplomats, the last generation of a craft that had begun in Italy after the Peace of Lodi in 1454.

  Millikan understood that now, in 1990, with the Soviet Union collapsing into itself, the Chinese Communist party making the improbable transition into the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, and even South Africa backing away from chaos, the United States had one enemy: Iran, and Iran’s worldwide terrorist network. Aziz knew the same thing, for his country had spent most of the previous decade in a gargantuan struggle with the vastly stronger—in virtually all respects—Iranians. He knew that only a deftly manipulated program of assistance, led both openly and covertly by the Americans, had allowed Iraq to survive. And so the two men, great respecters of each other’s skills, had the added advantage of being allies in all but name.

  A slight young Iraqi man sat next to Aziz—his assistant, and Dellinger’s counterpart. Another Iraqi, a dead ringer for the young Saddam Hussein, stood by the door, his jacket bulging conspicuously. Standing near the table was a middle-aged Frenchman, Gérard Touvain, the French Foreign Ministry liaison.

  Aziz bounded out from behind the table and headed straight for Millikan. It was a deliberate breach of protocol, no doubt carefully planned by Aziz to look like a spontaneous gesture. Gérard Touvain tried halfheartedly to intercede and make the proper introductions. He would listen in, but for both Aziz and Millikan would be no more functional than the designs on the wallpaper, and less efficient than the listening devices both knew were implanted in the room.

  Millikan shook Touvain’s hand perfunctorily. “Dr. Millikan,” Touvain said, “allow me to present His Excellency Tariq Aziz.”

  Millikan gave his best warm, two-handed grasp to his old colleague. “Zdraustvui, tovarishch,” Millikan said—the two had served in Moscow at the same time. “Salut, mon vieux,” Aziz responded, and the two sat down at the table. Touvain tried to make small talk, pointing out for whomever would listen the “belle lumière” of the hotel. The assistants were introduced, the Iraqi bodyguard was ignored, and Touvain, after a few minutes, was politely told to beat it.

  On the small table was a tray laid to Millikan’s specifications with a bottle of iced Stolichnaya, beluga caviar, and plates of black bread, butter, onions, chopped hard-boiled eggs. “I thought that you might have had too much champagne by this time, old friend,” Millikan explained, knowing the contempt in which Aziz held the French for, among other things, their sheltering of the Ayatollah Khomeini in the1970s.

  “You couldn’t be more correct, Jim,” Aziz responded.

  Millikan hated to be called Jim, had got into fights as a child when somebody had called him Jim, but Aziz had called him Jim for the past twenty years, and he was not about to ask him to change.

  “A toast,” Millikan said when the shot glasses were filled with the vodka, syrupy in its subzero cold. “To diplomacy.”

  The four clinked their glasses and downed the Stoli in a single gulp. They carefully prepared, consumed, and savored their slices of black bread with butter, onions, pieces of egg, and caviar. Aziz then proposed a toast. “To us, Jim, and the continued cooperation of our countries.”

  A half hour later the caviar was gone, the vodka half-drained and forgotten. The assistants had gobbled some bread and butter and had taken out their notepads. Millikan and Aziz, as befit kings of diplomacy, began the third course, a refreshing light lemony soup to clear the palate of the excellent but intense steak tartare that had preceded it.

  Aziz looked through the dishes and candlesticks and pointed upward to the ceiling, noting that they would both proceed on the assumption that they were not the only people listening. “How goes your task in Washington, mon collègue?”

  “Otlichno, moi drug.” Excellently, my friend. “The President understands what has to be done. With the exception of a few of the usual firebrands in Congress there is no problem. The press still understands that Iran is our major problem, although you have to understand that your boss by his very nature appeals to the more sensational of our journalists. Private sector is on board in supporting our policy. What about in your shop?”

  “We are very pleased with our cooperation with you—although you understand the need to replace both the men and matériel that we lost during the last war. We have had to make some creative use of some of your assistance. I’m sure you understand.”

  The two liked playing this game, knowing that as they spoke, their words were being reprocessed and sent to a dozen capitals. And they had said nothing that had not appeared in last week’s New York Times. “Is there anything more to talk about before the next course?” Millikan asked.

  “No,” Aziz responded. “Let’s let our friends enjoy some of this good food.” The stewards reentered, brought in new plates, and began the next course, a simple, hearty saumon grillée.

  They ate well and drank better, the two old friends who knew that their performance was being observed by a surveillance camera peering out between the louvers of the ventilation grille in the wall. No papers would be slipped across the table, nothing untoward would happen, except to live well, eat well, and have a good time—a diplomatic good time.

  “I have to take a piss,” Aziz suddenly announced in a loud voice.

  “Moi aussi,” Millikan responded. “I’ll go with you.” The steward led them across the main dining room, down a corridor, and around a few corners to the WC, accompanied the whole way by the bodyguard, who went in first and spent a couple of minutes checking under the fixtures for bombs.

  They went in, Aziz to a urinal, and Millikan to a stall—Millikan apologizing for his shy kidneys—and they loudly peed.

  Millikan began to chuckle naughtily, as though the vodka had made him regress back to a rowdy college boy.

  “What is it?” Aziz said loudly.

  “You must come and see what is written on the wall here, it’s quite amusing,” Millikan said.

  Aziz zipped up and went into the stall, squeezing in next to Millikan, who was standing there holding up a piece of crinkly French toilet paper on which he had written som
ething with a water-soluble felt-tip pen. Aziz took it and read it.

  It said: Are you going to fuck me over Kuwait?

  Aziz shook his head emphatically no. Millikan exhaled and seemed to relax. He took the paper back, tore it up, and flushed it. Aziz said, “I want to write down that telephone number, it might be useful sometime for some of my Iranian colleagues.”

  They went back to the table where their assistants were becoming quite relaxed—the vodka had given way to wine. A dessert tray came and went, accompanied by coffee and tea and then cigars. By this point it was three-thirty in the Hotel Crillon.

  “You’d best make sure our car is here,” Aziz said to his assistant, and then, turning to Millikan, “Please send my most sincere regards and admiration to your President.”

  “And the same to your leader, my friend.” The two shook hands heartily and emerged to be greeted by Touvain, who had been lingering at a nearby table with cigarettes, coffee, and an existential novel. The Iraqi assistant could scarcely walk. Dellinger threw himself down onto a sofa in the hotel lobby and closed his eyes. Millikan walked Aziz outside, where he was picked up in an Iraqi stretch Mercedes, the heaviest passenger vehicle Millikan had ever seen on the streets of Paris.

  The limousine door had scarcely been shut behind Aziz before he was on the cell phone to someone. Millikan, meanwhile, was already composing the cable to the President in his head. He wasn’t sure what it would say in every detail but, based on what Aziz had told him in the stall, knew it would include his favorite phrase: All is in order.

  It was fifty-eight degrees in Paris, and the spring flowers were in bloom. Dellinger was there suddenly, showing no signs of intoxication. “A walk would be nice,” Millikan said.

  Dellinger nodded significantly in the direction of the embassy.

  Millikan raised his eyebrows. “No walk?”

  Dellinger shrugged.

  Five minutes later they were back in the secure room.